Can the existing international nuclear liability regime prevent the re-occurrence of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters? (PDF)

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Law - European and International Law, Intellectual Properties, grade: merit, Queen Mary University of London (Department of Law), course: LLM, language: English, abstract: In this essay I would like to argue that the existing international nuclear liability framework cannot prevent great nuclear disasters. I will start with some considerations about Chernobyl and Fukushima, and then my discussion will continue with a framework of the international legal provisions that address related clauses of liability. I attempted to furnish plausible interpretation of the existing international legal framework before arriving at conclusion about the efficiency of this framework.

The nuclear accidents of Chernobyl, USSR in 1986 and Fukushima, Japan in 2011 rekindled serious and thought provoking discussions among the scientific communities, policy planners and beneficiaries of the world to understand whether the existing legal liability ensures the nuclear safeguards to the world for continued use of the nuclear technology at the cost of human and environmental tragedies. A thorough review of these two nuclear tragedies in light of legal provisions is made in the subsequent sections to understand [...]